Sony bought a little YouTube competitor for $ 65 million
By agreeing to pay $ 65 million for a small Grouper web service with a truly negligible market share of 1% (Hitwise data), Sony set a certain price level in the overheated video services market with amateur content, which have already appeared on the Internet for more than two hundred. This deal, the first of its kind, spawned a new wave of speculation about how much then the industry leader YouTube , which owns 43% of the market, can cost. Some experts are of the opinion that the proposals of $ 1 billion will no longer look too surprising. Whether such a price is fair is another question.
The question of a “fair price” is still a lot of controversy, because websites with amateur video content are a fairly new phenomenon, and it is still not clear how much they should cost. Standard methods for measuring the value of companies disappeared along with the “dot-com boom” at the end of the 1990s. last century. Even then, virtual portals were sold for billions of dollars. It seems that now this time is returning, only the place of portals was occupied by social services Web 2.0, such as YouTube.
It is still unclear how much money can be earned on a service like YouTube. This company has always been unprofitable and only a few days ago presented a kind of business model . Each of two hundred other companies in this market has a similar situation - none of them has yet announced that it has gone to zero. Another potential problem is the incomprehensible situation with the copyright of amateur content.
To calculate the cost of YouTube, analysts compare this startup with another startup of the generation of Web 2.0, which was sold a year ago for $ 560 million. This is the social network MySpace . That price was fair, which was confirmed by Google, which recently posted $ 900 million for the right to place search advertising on MySpace. At the time of purchase last year, MySpace had a monthly audience of only 12 million, while YouTube now has 16 million.
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At the same time, there are hundreds of startups on the Internet eager to repeat the success of YouTube. Each of them tries to stand out with something: a more user-friendly interface, more sophisticated technologies, additional functions. For example, Guba offers for download, in addition to amateur content, full-length movies. Startups Heavy.com and Veoh Networks with director Dmitry Shapiro create their own content while working in the new field of “Internet TV”. The cable television market in America alone generates about $ 65 billion a year. Internet companies want to grab a piece of this pie.
The question of a “fair price” is still a lot of controversy, because websites with amateur video content are a fairly new phenomenon, and it is still not clear how much they should cost. Standard methods for measuring the value of companies disappeared along with the “dot-com boom” at the end of the 1990s. last century. Even then, virtual portals were sold for billions of dollars. It seems that now this time is returning, only the place of portals was occupied by social services Web 2.0, such as YouTube.
It is still unclear how much money can be earned on a service like YouTube. This company has always been unprofitable and only a few days ago presented a kind of business model . Each of two hundred other companies in this market has a similar situation - none of them has yet announced that it has gone to zero. Another potential problem is the incomprehensible situation with the copyright of amateur content.
To calculate the cost of YouTube, analysts compare this startup with another startup of the generation of Web 2.0, which was sold a year ago for $ 560 million. This is the social network MySpace . That price was fair, which was confirmed by Google, which recently posted $ 900 million for the right to place search advertising on MySpace. At the time of purchase last year, MySpace had a monthly audience of only 12 million, while YouTube now has 16 million.
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At the same time, there are hundreds of startups on the Internet eager to repeat the success of YouTube. Each of them tries to stand out with something: a more user-friendly interface, more sophisticated technologies, additional functions. For example, Guba offers for download, in addition to amateur content, full-length movies. Startups Heavy.com and Veoh Networks with director Dmitry Shapiro create their own content while working in the new field of “Internet TV”. The cable television market in America alone generates about $ 65 billion a year. Internet companies want to grab a piece of this pie.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/4325/
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